Momentum is quickly gathering on the ‘blogosphere‘ (how I hate that stupid word) concerning the petty action being threatened by Gray and his heavy-handed lawyer monkeys.

I’m certain this will prove to be a landmark issue for weblogging, with numerous bloggers already jumping to the defence of Sheridan to highlight these pathetic bullying tactics, thereby demonstrating the power of weblogging as a new form of collective journalism.

Time will tell, but as Dan Gillmor has commented, the attention Gray is receiving is probably not what he would want, especially if he understood the implications for his reputation.

Additionally, Gray’s so-called Phd credentials aren’t looking too impressive, and the way things are going, his lawyers are going to be busy typing up more libel threats against the growing army of webloggers stepping forward to aid Sheridan and his cause, whether he is right, or wrong.

It aims to provide a model of the Solar System by scaling objects down and placing them throughout locations around the UK, in an attempt to give everyone an appreciation of the size of this little corner of space that we call home.

However, the distances between the Sun and the surrounding planets (such as Earth) are so vast, that it’s almost entirely impossible to give an understandable impression of scale.

According to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, on a diagram of the Solar System, with the Earth reduced to the size of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half off in the distance (and would be the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it).

On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be almost ten thousand miles away.

Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was the size of a full stop and Pluto was the size of a molecule, Pluto would still be thirty-five feet away.

It’s hardly something you can take the kids to see on a wet Sunday afternoon.

Irish blogger Gavin Sheridan is facing a blog libel threat because he referred to Dr John Gray (him of the self-help book Men are From Pluto and Women are from Uranus, or whatever it’s called) as a “fraud”.

Unfortunately, Gray is on the side of right, since Gavin stated for fact that which he could not prove to be true.

Perhaps if he’d prefixed his statement with “According to….”, he might be in a better off position.

As I’ve commented in his entry, he’d be best to apologise, retract the statement, change the entry, and move on.